


Son of the Shining Path

by sexysadie



Series: At Night [3]
Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: 1960s, Angst, Drug Use, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Non-Explicit Sex, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smoking, you can feel my love for cyn in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 01:12:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15897870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sexysadie/pseuds/sexysadie
Summary: Years have passed, but some things remain the same.A reunion and a departure.





	Son of the Shining Path

**Author's Note:**

> Here it is, the sequel that nobody asked for, two years after the last one was published! I just couldn't leave this series alone. This is written in a slightly different style to the other two, but I really hope you enjoy :)
> 
> (Also, I've changed my name from goldenthrone! Please excuse me for being indecisive haha)

They are in Norwich – God, _Norwich,_ who even _goes_ to Norwich? – and as Paul wakes and cautiously attempts to sit up in bed sickness rears unpleasantly in his throat, head immediately beginning to stamp out an insistent, aching rhythm.

For a couple of minutes, he sits on the edge of the bed, hands gripping the mattress, staring blearily out of the window at the shopkeepers across the road setting up for the day. John’s breathing is slow behind him and the clock on the cabinet between them reads ten to nine. The night before comes to him in whiskey-sweet snatches – a gig, a toast, a smoky club and hands and lips in the darkness, his memories increasingly blurred as the evening turned to morning and they celebrated the end of the tour.

 _The end,_ Paul thinks as he brushes his teeth in the bathroom, rolling the words around in his head like marbles. They’ve got about a fortnight to do fucking _nothing,_ lay in bed smoking, go out drinking, _whatever._ Of course, until the next tour starts and they’re back on the road again.

He swallows a couple of paracetamol and sits on the end of John’s bed while he pulls a jumper and a pair of trousers on. In the next room across he can hear the faint, familiar noise of George and Ringo, and outside their ground-floor window civilisation hums quietly – jingling road crossings, barking dogs, tyres on the tarmac. Paul loves touring, a new crowd every day, stints in forgettable hotel rooms segmented by long drives through flat green landscapes, the wonderful impermanence of it all. He thinks that maybe all the years in the same box of a room, staring at the ceiling, have given him an itch in the soles of his feet, an incurable wanderlust.

A knock on the door catches his attention. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes,” Brian says curtly, sounding hungover, probably due to the fact that the night before John had been telling the bartender to add more rum to his drink while he wasn’t looking.

Paul considers waking John up nicely, but instead takes the corner of John’s sheet and gives it a good tug, leaving him stark bollock naked in the centre of the bed at the mercy of the poorly-heated room. “Up with you, you dirty stopout.”

(It’s payback for when John dragged his mattress out into the hall without waking him somehow. He’d opened his eyes to see a bewildered looking maid staring at him from the end of the landing with a stack of towels in her hands, eyes like saucers, with only a thin sheet to preserve his dignity. John had found it hilarious. Needless to say, Paul hadn’t.)

“Ungh,” John says intelligently. “Timesit?”

“Time you had a shower. You smell like a lush.”

“S’cold.” John stretches, yawns like a cat, and then realises his current state of undress and scrabbles for the sheet on Paul’s bed. “You dirty bugger! I bet you’ve all been in here tossing yourselves off over me, haven’t you!”

“I would _never!_ ” Paul protests with mock indignation, and ducks out of the way of a sailing pillow. He busies himself shoving his sparse belongings into his duffel as John stomps into the bathroom, muttering something about being deflowered. It’s strange but not unpleasant, living out of bags and suitcases, with a razor, a toothbrush, a comb and three outfits rotated for hygiene. He likes the routine. A contained escape, freedom that’s already been mapped out for you, eliminating the danger of spontaneity.

After a subdued breakfast is a long, lazy train journey, a welcome departure from the van they’d been lugged about in for the past two months. John sits sideways on the seat with his feet in Paul’s lap, already planning their big return to the Liverpool scene that evening, though the thought of alcohol is still enough to make Paul feel a little queasy.

“I say we all wear nothing but our feather boas and show them a good time,” John says, lisping, and mimes rolling his hips effeminately.

“Yes-what-a-good-idea,” George replies tonelessly from underneath the newspaper he’d placed over his face ‘for privacy’ while he tries to sleep. John had already removed the top sheet, drawn a remarkably accurate picture of a cock on it in black marker, and replaced it without alerting him. The three of them dissolve into silent fits of laughter.

“Rings, you’ve- you’ve got somethin’ on your face there,” Paul says once they’ve calmed down a bit, voice wobbling, which sets them all off again. George, bless his cotton socks, is completely oblivious and remains that way even as John periodically adds stupid little caricatures until the paper is just a mass of black scribbles. In all fairness, they’ve got to keep themselves entertained somehow.

At some point, the compartment falls into a comfortable quiet, George and Ringo finally out for the count. The jagged hillscape of the Peak District slides past the window; Paul watches vibrant thickets of heather and rows of slender trees like sentries flicker in and out of view like slides in a camera.

“Where are you staying?” John asks, eyes closed, head lolling back against the wall. He looks exceedingly tired and it shows in his unguarded face and open palms, turned upwards towards the sky.

“A bed-sit on Porter Street. Quite nice there, actually.”

John opens one eye just a little. “I’d ask you to stay at Cyn’s, but she wouldn’t want the bairn catching summat nasty off you.”

Julian had been born a few weeks ago. As far as Paul knew, all John had seen of him since had been an hour or two in a hospital wing, hurried and perpetually overseen by the bird-like eyes of the nurses pressed against the window. Cyn had been lovely about it, waving off Paul’s stream of apologies about the tour keeping her husband away, but John’s silent seething as he signed autographs on his way out told a different story. He’d smiled coldly at the women as they blushed and giggled, fingers twitching around the pen in the subtlest way that they do when he’s about to start swinging, and when they’d sat backstage at the club that night he’d been alive with white-hot anger. “ _Pathetic. All of them.”_

But later that night, in the cold darkness of the van, all tangled up with one another, John had been so feather-soft, unfolding beneath Paul’s fingers like an origami crane. “I looked at him, Paulie, an’ I thought, ‘I made that’.” Illuminated by the passing streetlamps, John looked utterly in awe, as though the pink, squealing newborn was the most incredible thing he’d ever laid eyes on. Even now, there’s a faint smile on his lips, an edge of pride to his words.

Something small and sharp materialises just under Paul’s diaphragm, a flame of longing for things to be different, but he stamps it out quickly. It’s nothing he hasn’t felt before.

“It’s fine, y’know. Better than back home, anyroad.”

They settle back into comfortable silence for a couple of minutes, content to sit and watch the scenery. Then John says shortly, “d’you want me to come over tonight, before we go out? For a drink, like.”

His eyes are suddenly sharp and bright as knives where they’re looking at Paul, conscious of the two blokes sat opposite them, and Paul feels a sly smile creep over his face, all thoughts of Cynthia banished. He pretends to feel around in his pockets with exaggerated gestures. “Hold on, let me check my diary, might have somethin’ on-”

“Come off it,” John says with a smirk, “you’re always free.”

For John, maybe he is.

The door of the bedsit opens at seven, startling Paul away from the crap on the telly, some silly American soap opera about birds with pretty hair and strapping blokes cheating on their wives. He’d found himself being sucked into it after showering and doing his hair, swept back a little like the way he used to wear it, downplaying the shaggy European cut that he’s beginning to detest on the off chance that he might not be recognised. That had been hard enough before their faces were in the window of every record shop in Britain, grinning down from the balcony with giddy excitement. Still, there’s enough lads in Liverpool with that new cut, the one he’d noticed being advertised in a barber shop earlier with a surreal thrill of disbelief, that he _might_ be able to get away with it.

“God, Paul. ‘ _The Secret Storm’?”_ John sneers as he closes the door behind him. “The prellies really did a number on you.”

“It’s alright, actually,” Paul says vaguely, eyes still reluctantly glued to the screen. “And if it’s so shite, how come you know its name?”

“Never said they didn’t do a number on me, too.” Toeing his boots off, John gives the place the up-and-down. His concern for Paul’s lodging conditions is really quite sweet. Paul cocks his head, half-smiles at him inquisitively; John catches him and sticks his tongue out. “What?”

“Nowt. Stop being daft and come ‘ead.”

For a long moment, John stands there, all long, dark eyes and slightly parted mouth. The tip of his tongue darts out to wet his lips. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

As much as Paul enjoys it, tour comes with its restrictions, which is why they’re slower about it this time, sober and lazy in the last light of the spring evening. John’s content to lie back and let Paul do the work, watching as Paul undresses in the way he’d learned from the classier girls in Hamburg, making it all a part of the experience – letting his fingers curl under the hem of his shirt, sliding them under the waistband of his trousers, smooth and sultry where usually he’d wrestle them off without a second thought.

He presses his face into the crook of John’s neck while they fuck, breathing in the warm sweat-shampoo smell there. “You’re ruining-” He cuts himself off with an involuntary noise suddenly, then moves his mouth closer to John’s ear. “You’re ruinin’ my hair.”

That makes John laugh, short and strangled. “Nice to know you’ve got your priorities in order.”

Once they’re done John offers him a cigarette, and they smoke in silence for a little while, chests rising and falling in rough synchronisation with each other. John has well and truly ruined Paul’s hair – it’s loose at the front, coming away at the fringe in damp little curls, and Paul runs a hand through it hopelessly. It looks like he’s going to have to wear it like usual and bring a pole to fight people off.

“How’s Cyn?” he asks, if just to make conversation.

“A silly bitch,” John replies with a little heat, rolling off the bed and sauntering towards the window, tall and broad-shouldered and totally naked. “She’s put gates all around the house, even though the little bugger can’t even hold his head up straight yet, let alone fall down the stairs.”

“Maybe they’re for you.” Paul extinguishes his cigarette on the bedside table and joins John by the window. The landscape outside is one of extreme familiarity – a row of red-bricked, terraced houses all slumped against each other like dominoes with weather-worn slate roofs and little concrete gardens, weeds sprouting at the base of each sagging wall. The women here have no shame when they hang their knickers out on the line for all to see and the children lose themselves down back alleys, escaping into fighter planes and dense jungle and sun-stunned desert. Paul aches with a sudden love for hardy, war-torn Liverpool, despite all those hours he spent hating it when he was younger, wishing for a hole to open up and swallow it, and him with it.

“Feels like it,” John grumbles. “S’like I’m a giraffe at the bastard zoo.”

“Tuppence to see Lennon, live and in the flesh! Thruppence to throw rocks at him!”

“You’re makin’ me out to be some bloody tart here, Macca.” John turns, yawns and starts towards the bathroom, all lit up by the sun that makes his hair autumn-gold. “Best get this show on the road, then, before all the prime skirt’s gone.”

The club is close and dark. Not the same way as the Cavern, where the slicing sound of guitars makes the air ripple and split and smoke hangs inches thick against the ceiling, but heavy and dense as if under the sea, crushed below thousands of tonnes of water. It isn’t their usual scene, and it certainly doesn’t play the music they like, but it’s somewhere they’re less likely to be recognised.

They stand in the doorway for a moment or two, a couple of blokes who, just three years ago, dressed entirely in scrappy leather and Cuban heels, listening to Roy Orbison echo off of the magenta-painted walls. John has this brilliant expression on his face, one of grim determination, like a soldier preparing for battle.

“Did you bring your boa?” Paul asks.

“Yes, it’s in my pocket,” John replies dryly and wades into the mass of people, making an immediate beeline for the drink.

Scanning the crowd half-heartedly (God, he just wants to go to bed), Paul spots a slightly drunken looking bird at the bar with dark, shoulder-length hair and one of those dresses all the girls wear, with the silly round collars. She catches his eye, sips her drink and smiles coyly at the ground. An invitation.

“Hoy,” Paul says, slipping into the seat next to her. “What’s a pretty place like you doing in a girl like this?”

She laughs, one dainty hand settling on her thigh, another clutching a glass of wine. There’s a faint shadow of red on her upper lip, and her kohl edged eyes are a cool, depthless shade of grey, reflecting the neon pink lights on the walls. “I should be asking you the same question. I haven’t seen you here before.”

The first hurdle is crossed; there is no trace of recognition in her face, just something smooth and chocolate-brown in her voice. “I’ve been down-country for a while,” he lies with practised ease, “and it’s Jim, by the way.”

His father’s name sours in the back of his throat. The girl is nice and all, introducing herself as Joyce, all black Irish and mellow accent with cracking tits, a real catch in anyone’s books. She’s twenty-three, she says, a nursing student at the Royal, dances ballet and plays the piano, has two dogs and a cat, and Paul just _doesn’t care_. How can he, when a couple of hours earlier he was flush against another bloke, and his best mate, at that?

After an hour or so it proves to be a little too much, the thud of the bass in his ears too loud and the rum and coke in his hands too sweet, so he excuses himself with a wink and an empty promise to return. A little down the bar, John is entertaining a little blonde Bridgette Bardot look alike, gesturing wildly with both hands, the Scouse sharpness to his voice in full effect.

“Let’s make a break for it, yeah? Go to a different club,” Paul whispers in his ear as he passes, one hand on his lower back. “Crowd’s dead here.”

Another lie. On the dancefloor girls are spinning like tops, skirts flying up past their knees, blokes leering and watching with trained eyes for flashes of underwear. The place is heaving, alive with sweaty bodies and loud voices, screaming laughter from the girls and a jovial voice over the speaker system, his own voice, _and you know you should be glad!_

“No, it’s not,” John says petulantly, the soft and rounded influence of alcohol in his voice. “Hey, listen, Paulie, they’re playin’ us!”

“I know,” Paul hisses, shooting a glance at the girl, who’s busy picking her nails. “Now let’s go.”

Much moaning ensues; Paul apologises to the girl profusely as he all but drags John up the stairs. He’s about to turn away and out of the door when a voice _just_ catches his attention, barely snagging on to the very edge of his consciousness. If he didn’t have such a good ear, then maybe he might not have heard it; for a second he’s sure he imagined it, tricked by the familiarity of home and the thud of sound in the club. Something aches in his gut, excitement and trepidation painful there as he turns and scans the crowd of people for a face he’s not sure he’d recognise anyway.

“What?” John asks at his elbow, craning his neck to look in the same direction as Paul. They’re elevated above the rest of the club – the entrance door opens onto a balcony affair with a railing, so they’ve got a good view of everyone there. But Paul can’t pick out the face he wants to see.

John’s bird is looking a little impatient, so Paul tells him to go and he’ll catch him up later, waving him off dismissively.

“See someone you like?” John asks with a wink.

“I don’t know,” Paul says truthfully as John turns and waltzes his blushing bit of skirt out onto the street, singing something raucous about a bird called Donna Marie and her unfortunate romance.

Paul’s distracted by the song’s lyrics – _“A brisk young sailor courted me/He robbed me of me liberty/He blew me maidenhood to bits/It’s probably ‘cos I’ve got big tits”_ – and loses the place in the crowd where the voice had come from, the milling crush of people swallowing and spitting out faces at random until he’s sure it’s hopeless. He plans to leave, disappear into the darkness with John and accept that he’s only hearing things, just after he gives the place one last sweep-

There’s Mike, stood by the bar, holding a drink and laughing at something a fair-haired lad is saying, tall and sharp-jawed and _grown-up_. Paul feels the realisation collide with him like a fist to the solar plexus, a blow that knocks the air right out of him.

He’s walking towards him before he even knows what he’s doing, down the staircase and into the pit of the club, descending into the throng of noise and warm bodies. He hasn’t spoken to his little brother for two years now, hasn’t seen him for four, and while the softness of childhood has gone from Mike’s face he’s still unmistakably the brother that waved goodbye sadly to Paul from their uncle’s car all that time ago. Every now and then, Paul feels that same vivid, stinging hurt singing in his blood as if it were fresh.

“Mike!” Finally breaching the edge of the crowd, Paul places a hand on Mike’s shoulder, startling him away from his conversation. He turns, and for the briefest of seconds there’s nothing in his face, just blank unrecognition, and Paul is suddenly struck with the stomach-turning idea that perhaps Mike’s forgotten about him. Or maybe he just wants nothing to do with Paul; Paul, who was too much of a girl’s blouse to get out of that house, who scurried around doing his dad’s bidding for far longer than he should have, desperate to smooth things out and make everything alright, even after anyone with any common sense would have realised that nothing would be alright ever again.

But then a light switches on behind Mike’s eyes, and he gathers Paul in close for a crushing hug that feels like home.

“Paul! Christ on a bike, mate!” he says brightly, letting Paul go to hold him at arms’ length and beaming from ear to ear. Paul allows the smile to catch, a disbelieving and almost tearful feeling growing like a bubble in his chest, drinking in Mike’s face, his hair and clothes. “I saw you! On the telly, with your band!”

“Oh, aye, we’re all over the place nowadays,” Paul says faintly.

“I listened to your LP, it’s gear! Really gear!”

“Come with me,” Paul shouts over the thumping music. Motioning for Mike to follow, he turns and begins to wade back through the mass of people, desperate for the bracing cold outside, something to give him a firm smack back into reality. Mike’s meant to be in Ireland with a stretch of cold, black water separating him from Liverpool and their father. But instead he’s here in some nameless club and seeing him in the flesh has made something spin loose in Paul’s mind.

When they emerge from the doors Paul is suddenly _gasping_ for a smoke. He lights a cigarette swiftly and inhales like he’s a drowning man before holding the box out to Mike, who accepts one with a nod of thanks. They stand and smoke in silence for a little while as the bass of the music rumbles beneath their feet, watching each other, waiting for someone to start talking.

Eventually, Mike crushes his fag under his heel and says, “Paul… where have you been?”

Paul exhales a last cloud of smoke. “I told you. All over the place. London, Hamburg, Paris… we were in Norwich this morning.”

“You know what I mean,” Mike says sternly, fixing Paul with a searching stare. “We didn’t hear from you for years. I thought…” He trails off, swallows, and the words left unsaid hang in the air between them like a bad smell.

“I left,” Paul says shortly, and lights another cigarette. “When I was eighteen. Da didn’t know I was going. We went to Germany and I didn’t go back.”

“Why didn’t you call?” A direct contrast the joy he’d greeted Paul with, Mike’s tone is hurt and accusatory now, bordering on wheedling. He’s still only nineteen, Paul reminds himself, and there’s no way he could understand the frantic flurry of uprooting yourself from the only life you’ve ever known, bouncing from living room to living room and neglecting everything except the need for food and shelter and to be as far away from Forthlin Road as possible. So he just shrugs, lets his eyes follow a bloke stumbling, legless, down the street, instead of meeting Mike’s eyes.

“Didn’t have the number.”

He’s reminded suddenly of that last phone call, sat on the floor of the hallway, listening to Mike’s uninterested voice and searching for something, anything, to say. “I’m sorry, I really am, but it got manic, what with the band, and… you were safe over with Auntie Jin.”

Mike looks at him for a little while longer, eyes gleaming in the glowing neon lights advertising the club. “The band.” He smiles to himself. “You always said you wanted to be a singer. You used to dance around in your pants to Little Richard.”

“An’ you were my backup singer,” Paul remembers fondly, letting the memory wash away the unpleasantness of the previous conversation. “Shite one, at that.”

“I ‘ave the voice of an angel,” Mike protests, and that sets Paul off laughing. “Hey! What are you laughing at, you prick?”

“Nothing.” Paul arranges his face into a solemn expression. A smile twitches on Mike’s face before he produces a pen and crumpled up receipt from a jacket pocket.

“Here, I’ll write down my address and me number so you won’t have an excuse not to call,” he says, scribbling something down in familiarly looping cursive. There’s so much they still have to say to each other: so much explaining, apologising, forgiving, too much for one hurried evening on a street in deepest Liverpool. He hands the receipt to Paul, and then ducks a little to look him square in the face, forcing his gaze upwards to meet his own. “But seriously, Paul. It’s all okay, now?”

“It’s okay,” Paul says, and he really, truly means it.

-

The beginning of the end of it all starts with a ringing telephone.

More specifically, it’s Brian’s ‘business phone’ up in the box, which rings with such a shrill urgency that it’s ruined at least a dozen takes with its noise. In fact, it startles John so badly that he almost falls off his chair. He’d always hated that phone. He used to tell Brian that if he didn’t get rid of it they’d play cricket with it for a ball and a guitar as a bat.

“Hoy,” George shouts, “Mal! Phone!”

Looking haggled, Mal thumps in from another room. The band aren’t to answer for obvious reasons, so they’ve taken to making Mal run about answering them like an overworked butler. He takes the stairs two at a time, earning an absent chuckle from Paul.

“Wonder if that’s what he signed up for.”

Perhaps not, but the new album had been a bitch for all of them. The past few weeks had been countless hours spent with cramping fingers glued to fretboards or clutching pens; stealing catnaps between sessions; slogging away long into the early hours of the morning; all to make Brian’s poxy Christmas release so as they’ll all be that bit richer. At times John feels so brittle he could snap in half. He can see it in the rest of the band, too, in their waxy faces under the studio lights at quarter past two on a Tuesday morning and their slow and sluggish hands, always spilling drinks or missing chords, like they’re plastic figurines.

That’s where the name’s from: _Rubber Soul._ John’s proud of that one.

After a minute or so, Mal re-enters the room, or at least John guesses he does from the heavy footsteps rumbling down the stairs. He glances up from his book, stares into space for a couple of moments, and then looks back down at the page. He tries to focus on the sentence he’d been reading. _Basil Hallward turned to the servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight. “Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker: I will be in in a few moments.”_

John vividly remembers reading Wilde as a teenager, sat cross-legged on his bed and open mouthed in concentration with a potent combination of intrigue and confusion swirling in his head (and his crotch). Today, though, even _Gray_ can’t interest him. The stuff Fraser’s hooking him up with is lethal. He sighs, stretches, places the book on the table amongst sheet music and empty mugs, watching lazily as Paul trots up the stairs behind Mal. He’s got a high-necked maroon jumper and dark jeans on, such a far cry from the dirty German leather he’d worn a lifetime ago.

“Who is it?” John asks George, who’s mucking around on Ringo’s deserted drums while the latter’s still out for lunch. The sound of a poorly-played hi-hat stops and George swivels around on the little stool to face John.

“Dunno.” He shrugs. “Probably Jane saying he’s forgot to put the washing out.”

“Aye,” John agrees, leaning back in his chair. Paul didn’t talk about Jane anymore, the same way that John didn’t talk about Cyn. When he did he was short and clipped and visibly uncomfortable about it, so John had learned to leave her name out of conversation.

Sometimes, John feels bad for Cyn. He had looked at her pretty face and dutifully blonde hair in the soft dawn sunlight one morning and felt a deep, guilty ache just above his navel. Her forehead had the beginning of worry lines forming, etched in by the years trapped in a barren relationship and raising a child just barely out of her teens. He lay there and wondered whether she knew; whether Jane knew; whether they’d ever rung each other up and whispered to each other, _‘D’you think my bloke’s shagging your bloke?’_ (As if velvet-and-patent-leather Jane would ever talk to Liverpool lass Cynthia).

No, he’d concluded, listening to the cars wake up outside, she couldn’t know. Even if she did, she’d keep quiet about it, because demure, deer-like Cynthia had some fire in her when it came to defending John from the frequent and not always untrue accusations that people had flung his way, back when he was a little savage and glassed people in pubs like it was a professional sport. Jane probably has her head too far up her own arse to notice what Paul is doing, besides the things he’s doing wrong. John knows that Paul doesn’t talk to her about his father because on the occasions he does to John, he speaks with the desperate, gut-spilling relief of someone who’s been holding it all in for far too long.

From what John knows, Jane is little more than a thorn in Paul’s side these days, a pretty, if irritating thing to keep on his arm. A business transaction. She dates Britain’s sweetheart and gets the lead roles in the films, he has an alibi, a beautiful woman he can use to conceal the parts of his life that the press won’t like. Everyone wins, no one gets hurt.

Which is why, when Paul comes back down the stairs looking visibly shaken, John knows something’s off.

The haze of the grass he’d smoked a little while earlier is slowly beginning to wear off, so he picks up his book again and slides his glasses onto his face. Over the top of the page he watches Paul putter about around the studio, finding a plectrum, plugging something in with an electrical pop, draining the last of his tea. George has started a sort of toy-soldier marching rhythm on the snare. Paul should be messing around with him, trying to balance a drumstick on the end of his finger or abusing the cymbals, but instead he drifts to a halt, stands by an amp and stares into the middle distance listlessly, eyebrows drawn.

“You’ve got your thinking face on,” Paul had said to him in Paris, and John hadn’t really known what he’d meant at the time. But now, as he watches Paul, he can see the cogs turning behind those soft dark eyes. He wishes he could open up Paul’s mind, dig around in there and find out what’s turning the lever.

“Hey, Macca, what’re you-”

And that’s when Ringo arrives, keys jangling, saying something about a new restaurant downtown where “the waitresses all have – an’ I cannot stress this enough – _massive_ knockers.” George drops the drumsticks guiltily and Paul stutters back to life, placing the handful of paper he’d been holding down on the amp and playing along with Ringo’s animated description of a bird named Vivian.

John keeps an eye on Paul all afternoon while they tape one of George’s new songs. He’s in the room, but his mind’s elsewhere. He misses his cues and fumbles his basslines to the point that even John is exasperated, apologising sheepishly and laughing it off, stiff and lacking humour.  They get a few hours in before it’s clear that everyone is overtired and utterly fed up, and an exhausted looking George Martin tells them all to bugger off home before he strangles them.

John means to catch Paul once everyone’s gone, but he’s out of the door like a bullet from a gun without so much as a goodbye to anyone, and that’s when John knows something’s _definitely_ wrong.

“Go and sort him out, John,” George groans as the door swings shut behind him. “He’s acting like a snubbed fishwife. God knows that witch’ll be the death of him.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll fix him up,” John assures him. “With a little tender loving care, if you know what I mean.” He winks, and George and Ringo pull twin faces, but John feels the joke rattle about in his head emptily.

With urgency rising in his stomach, John swings open the heavy fire doors with a little too much vigour as they bang against the wall. Already questions are bubbling over like a pot left on too high, tripping over his tongue. Perhaps it was just Jane, nagging and whining like she always does, and perhaps Paul will tell him to leave him alone and stop mothering him. Or maybe it was Mike, slow and solemn, telling him he’s dying of the same sickness that took their mam. Or perhaps, John thinks with a shrill sick feeling, it was someone who John didn’t know about, some secret lover who’d backed out for fear of the press, and that’s why Paul couldn’t meet John’s eyes-

Paul is sat sideways in the open door of his Aston with his feet on the tarmac. He looks small and young and defeated. John stands in the doorway and surveys him cautiously for a moment, judging the situation with a squint; it’s all too familiar yet still uneven ground. They’d both changed in years past, for better or for worse. Paul’s late-night calls have tapered off, and John’s more likely to lose his temper at Paul’s ‘moping’, as if the months living on top of each other in hotel rooms and aeroplanes had rubbed away at their tolerance for each other. As a result, where he should be calm and supportive, John’s often sandpaperish – his tongue too sharp and too quick, filling silences with quips which fall flat from his mouth and clatter on the floor between them, a death knell of sorts.

“Hullo,” Paul says, without looking up. “S’pose you’ve been sent.”

“Oh, yes. Come an’ sit on me lap and tell me all about it.”

There’s a beat, a dreadful beat which slides on far past its natural end point. Paul raises his head, and he’s not crying, but in the thin grey light his face looks wrong.

“Me da’s dead,” he says shortly. “It was the Royal calling. Cirrhosis of the liver.”

“Oh.”

What’s he meant to say? “About time” springs to the forefront of his mind. God knows John had gotten close to putting the fucker in the ground many times before. However, it’s clearly not relief that’s causing the hard set of Paul’s mouth and the forward hunch of his shoulders – more like the bone-deep pain both of them had felt their fair shares of, the type that radiates all the way from your stomach to the tips of your fingers and toes.

“He asked to speak to me, John. Said his son was Paul McCartney an’ they didn’t believe him, so he died there in the hospital by himself. Jesus fucking Christ.”

John imagines dying in a bed, surrounded by flat, unfamiliar faces with the smell of medicine in his nose and the knowledge that he’s about to dive deep into the recesses of hell sharp as a jack-knife in his brain.

“Are you gonna go?” John starts. Stops. “To the funeral.”

“What funeral?” Paul laughs, incredulous, and John sees him unravel just a little. This is old wounds being forced open, stitches being pulled out and plasters ripped away, the careful armour Paul had been wearing slipping, revealing something softer underneath. “I don’t- I’m not-”

Paul looks all coiled up, as though he wants to do _something-_ what, John’s not sure. He stands there, limp and useless, and watches Paul rebuild himself, drawing up his shoulders, steeling his mouth, dragging a hand down his face. The day is November-bleak, and John’s cold without a proper jacket. He aches to put an arm around Paul’s shoulder, to bury his face in the hollow of his throat like he used to in his bedroom in Mendips, smelling cologne and warm skin.

But he doesn’t.

“Listen,” Paul says eventually, shattering the silence. “I’m going home, alright? Don’t tell anyone.” He looks pointedly at John. “Please.”

John nods. “Of course, Macca.”

The sound of the Aston’s door slamming shut reverberates around John’s skull as he’s driving home and continues to thunder in his ears as he walks up the steps to Kenwood’s heavy wooden door. He’d considered following Paul home, just to be safe, but decided against it when he’d remembered that they’re both adult men who can take care of themselves, now. Somewhere along the line, Paul had stopped needing John, and it’s John’s fault for not noticing.

Cyn fusses at him, hair dishevelled; Jules is in a bad mood and glares at John with his fist in his mouth from his perch on the chaise-lounge.

“Evening, sunshine,” John snaps tiredly at the toddler, who removes his fist and shouts something monosyllabic in return.

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

“John!” Cynthia scolds, bending over to pick up one of Jules’ toys. She looks flustered and her floral frock has a stain on the front, presumably where Jules has thrown food at her. (“He gets it from you,” she’d hissed once, and John couldn’t argue). “He’s already being a little menace, don’t make him worse.”

Upper-working-class Cynthia found the move to Kenwood hard. Every one of their little Liverpool posse comes from somewhere in that sweet spot between poverty and the middle-class, all suddenly plunged into this foreign world of fabulous wealth and plenty. John remembers Cyn’s awed face when he’d first taken her up the drive with Kenwood’s grand mock-Tudor architecture cresting over the top of the hill, nestled amongst the carefully landscaped gardens, ornate brickwork and blue heather. He’d showed her the wallpaper for the dining room – purple velvet, five pounds a metre, and she’d cried.

“John, we haven’t got enough things to put in here,” she’d said, there in the entrance hall, all teary and breathless, which John had found funny at the time. Later that day he’d had them bring in a _thing –_ a suit of armour –  just to fill the place up. Simply because he could.

In time, the novelty had worn off, and here’s poor Cyn now, exhausted from chasing a toddler from dining room to drawing room to kitchen and back round again. They have a maid, but Cyn in turn has a ‘compulsion’ about cleaning – a traditional Northern upbringing has instilled in her a traditional Northern set of skills, one that she’s finding hard not to use, and it’s all taking its toll on her. John watches her scoop up their son and bounce him on her hip, cooing and singing a soothing little lullaby, and feels a sudden pang of affection for her.

It makes him feel a little sick when he realises that despite all this, he’d swap her for Paul in a heartbeat.

“I’m off upstairs,” he says vaguely to Cyn’s back. She doesn’t acknowledge him.

The first thing he does up in the warm darkness of the attic is have a smoke, inhaling the sweet stuff long and deep to flush out the day’s tension. It works to an extent, but he can’t get the image of Paul all crumpled in on himself like a deflated balloon out of his head, so instead he lays there on the settee, still worrying, without the motivation to actually do anything about it.

Up on the wall, the pencil pictures of Paul and George and Ringo and Brian and Cyn and Stu watch him with smudged, black-and-white eyes. Despite himself, John finds himself drifting, the late nights in the studio catching up with him, and when he sleeps he dreams about velvet wallpaper under his fingers, covering the ceiling and the floor, an unbroken carpet of soft indigo.

Cyn’s gentle hand on his shoulder wakes him up.

“Paul’s on the phone,” she says, brows drawn in concern. “He sounds upset. Is he okay?”

That makes John sit up, a cold thrill rippling through him. “How would I know? I haven’t talked to him yet, ‘ave I?”

“I was just asking,” Cyn replies, quietly petulant, and pads back down the attic stairs with soft slippered footsteps.

The clock says twenty to twelve in the drawing room, and the phone is laying, off the hook, on the table. John stands a few feet away from it for a brief moment, listening in the dark silence of the house for sounds from the other end. There’s nothing.

Finally, and not without hesitation, he picks it up. “Hello, Battersea Dogs’ Home,” he says into the receiver, putting on a stupid voice. “Whatever your preferences, we’ve got a bitch for you.”

“John,” Paul says, laughing wetly. “Johnny.”

“The one and only.”

For a minute, Paul doesn’t respond. The moment hangs between them, each of them drinking in the other’s presence, taking comfort from the wordless, understanding silence. They don’t need to speak; Paul’s breathing on the other end of the line tells John that he is _there,_ and he is listening, and they are teenagers and Paul is whispering down the phone, _“so fuckin’ scared, Johnny.”_ It’s the first snow of the winter and heavy, silent flakes are floating past the window as they talk. John’s not pleased because he knows that Paul’s heating stopped working weeks ago and recently he’s been looking thinner and unhappier each day. But then Paul laughs and says, “I’m comin’ over, whether you like it or not,” and it’s alright, because they can make it alright.

“He’s gone,” grown-up Paul says, reverence in his voice. “I thought he’d come back to get me, God help me. He’s gone.”

‘He’s gone,” John repeats as the emotion in Paul’s voice washes over him in heavy, rolling waves, sinking into each muscle, weighing him down as if he’s a sponge soaking up all the grief and joy and bitter regret through his skin. He’s sure he’d take on all of Paul’s emotions if he could, siphon all the bad stuff out of him bit by bit, even if it made him mad. Paul would visit him in the loony bin anyroad.

On the other end of the line Paul makes this funny little sound and John realises he’s crying. _Really_ crying, the kind where you don’t make an effort to hide the sounds welling up from deep inside you. He never _really_ cried back in Liverpool because lads didn’t cry, but now they’re locked up in their big, dark houses by themselves, away from prying eyes, and they’re _the_ _Beatles_ so they can do what they want.

“Don’t do that, love.” John never knew what to do back then, and he doesn’t now.

“God, sorry- acting like a fucking baby-”  

John wonders how long it will take for the hurt to leave Paul, to bleed out like ink from a pen, and if it will ever happen. He says nothing, no words of comfort or scorn. Instead, he sits on the line, just like Paul did years ago on that sunny July day when John’s world fell to the ground around him in the white-and-pink parlour at Menlove.

Sometimes there is pain in you that needs to be exorcized, poison that wants sucking out from a wound, lest it should eat you up from the inside, and sometimes all you need is for someone to twist the tourniquet tight while you do it yourself.

John wakes up with his cheek in a puddle of his own spit. It’s light outside, and music from the birds in the line of tall leylandii by the window punctuates Jules’ delighted squealing in the kitchen and the melodic sound of Cynthia cooing at him. John sits up and smokes for a minute, until the cherry-red plastic of the phone’s receiver catches his eye and he swipes it up, listening – hoping – for the sound of someone on the other end.

There’s nothing but the dial tone.

John replaces it on its hook with a twinge of disappointment and starts upstairs to shower and shave. They’ve got work to do today.


End file.
